The Canadian Human Rights Commission has received its independent Report On Hate Messaging on the Internet prepared by Richard Moon of the University of Windsor.
Early reports have focussed on the headline recommendation:
section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) be repealed so that the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) would no longer deal with hate speech, in particular hate speech on the Internet.
The recommendation continues to say:
Hate speech should continue to be prohibited under the Criminal Code but confined to expression that advocates, justifies or threatens violence. In the fight against hate on the Internet, police and prosecutors should make greater use of section 320.1 of the Criminal Code, which gives a judge power to order an Internet service provider (ISP) to remove “hate propaganda” from its system.
But that isn’t all that the report says about ISPs.
The report calls for ISPs to create their own hate speech advisory body:
The major Internet service providers (ISPs) should consider the creation of a hate speech complaint line and the establishment of an advisory body, composed of of individuals with expertise in hate speech law, that would give its opinion as to whether a particular website hosted by an ISP has violated section 13 of the CHRA or the “hate propaganda” provisions of the Criminal Code.
If this body were to decide that the complaint is well founded, the ISP host would then shut down the site on the basis of its user agreement with customers.
Further, while the report calls for this to initially deal with hate speech hosted in Canada, it suggests that applying this process to deal with content originating outside Canada can be studied later.
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illegal content, CHRC